Microsoft introduced Azure Budgets as a means to help companies plan for and drive organizational accountability. While many companies view budget enforcement from a traditional perspective such as alerts, currently Azure did not give you more direct options such as shutting down virtual machines (VMs). Using Budgets makes Azure cost management easy.

While these features are not out of the box, Azure Budgets does offer integration with Azure Action Groups. Action Groups provide a means to trigger an orchestrated set of actions resulting from a budget event. Such actions can be turning off machines when a threshold takes place (in this case when the budget is exceeded by a certain amount), for example. The action groups in term can then execute a PowerShell script (within an automation account) to perform the cost savings action.

It should be noted: this course of action does not need to be applied to all VMs. For example, the
shutdown sequence of VMs to keep within budget can be directed to machines:

What happened?

How did we get here? A littl e more than a year ago, and as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people in the workforce were asked to start working from their home offices. Some went home with an assigned corporate laptop, but a lot went with whatever system could be found – lab machines, hastily repaired systems, and tech closet castoffs. Now, a lot of those users are continuing to work from home, even as companies start to reopen. This is part of a trend towards the hybrid workplace which was already under way pre-COVID but was accelerated by the pandemic. Windows Autopilot addresses this trend to make the process easier.

One of the pillars of Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) is the technology behind profile container technology, referred to as FSLogix. Upon login, the FSLogix profile container is connected to the computing environment so the profile is readily available.

This then raises the question on the ideal locations to host the repository of profiles generated FSLogix usage. Aspects to consider:

• Space usage: FSLogix Profile Containers and Office Containers are dynamic files that will grow to a maximum default size of 30 GB.
• IOPS operation per user session: The table below illustrates the projected IO footprint per user session.

Steve Baker, a Senior Security Solutions Architect here at Rutter, recently had the opportunity to speak with Executive Marketing and Business Advisory Services (EMBAS) about managed network security solutions. There are many issues surrounding network security that are top of mind for companies of all sizes including fraud, hacking, data breaches, etc. Steve talks about these threats and what can be done about them and to create managed network security solutions.

For those trying to relay SMTP with an application in Azure to Office, base guidance and options can be found in the Microsoft article “How to set up a multifunction device or application to send email using Microsoft 365 or Office 365”. In the article, three distinct distinct options are provided for Office 365 relay, noted in the table below:

Policies are an essential part of an overall security strategy and are many times under-valued or overlooked completely. Organizations of all sizes often struggle with developing a comprehensive information security strategy due to the challenges of prioritizing where to begin. Strong and effective policies provide an excellent set of resources to help set expectations, provide long and short term goals, and identify gaps that may need to be closed. No matter the maturity level of your organization’s information security strategy, well written policies put you on the right path for continued development.

In part 1 of these series we discussed the merits of Azure file sync. One of the options of this technology is Cloud tiering. This feature of Azure File Sync in which frequently accessed files are cached locally on the server while all other files are tiered to Azure Files based on policy settings. When a file is tiered, the Azure File Sync file system filter replaces the file locally with a pointer, or reparse point. In the event a user needs a file which has been cached, Azure File Sync quietly downloads the file from Azure Files from the cloud.

Azure file sync is the offering of syncing file information from a file server to a storage account in the cloud. The file server becomes transformed into a local cache of information, and with policies in place, tiering will move older information to the cloud. By doing so, a file server can be extended dramatically.

Historically, one of the challenges of Azure was trying to contain private traffic to resources such as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Azure files, and Azure SQL. Customers envisioned having a cloud data center with services, and they strived for a vehicle to encapsulate the traffic as they would with a traditional data center.